A fond look back at the Sega Genesis classic Mutant League Hockey!
With the Stanley Cup Finals underway, it’s a pretty opportune time to revisit Mutant League Hockey — if nothing else, because it’s one of the few sports video games out there more violent than the actual National Hockey League product.
The 1994 Sega Genesis cult classic comes to us from video game juggernaut Electronic Arts, the same industrial titan behind the Madden football monolith. I guess you could say that Mutant League Hockey is technically a sequel, since it follows in the footsteps of EA’s Mutant League Football from 1993. The same way that game used a modified version of the proprietary Madden engine, Mutant League Hockey likewise takes advantage of a modified version of the proprietary NHL ‘94 engine. And since NHL ‘94 is STILL regarded as one of, if not the very best hockey video games ever made, the digital pedigree of Mutant League Hockey was never in doubt.
Of course, you don’t need to know anything about the actual sport to enjoy Mutant League Hockey. After all, this is a game about skeletons and robots beating each other to death on ice rinks littered with murder weapons and monsters that periodically pop out of the ground to devour players. As long as you remember that the puck still has to go into the other guy’s net, you’re good to go.
Mutant League Hockey is the blissful marriage of sports and horror and it does the shtick about as well as any video game I’ve ever played. A lot of the characters are puns on real world hockey players and almost all of the team names are parodies of actual NHL teams (i.e., the Montroyale Cadavers.) There may not be that many people who are equally passionate about hockey and horror out there, but they are going to LOVE this thing for sure.
One of the unusual things about Mutant League Hockey is how it relegates the on-ice players to just three types of monsters and/or cyborgs. You’ve got skeletons, you’ve got ogres and you’ve got robots — all of which definitely look the part. Each type of player has their own strengths and weaknesses (as in, one type might be faster, one might be harder to knock down, etc.) which essentially makes the game a secret ode to the legendary Ice Hockey game on the old school Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s a slightly simplified game compared to the mainline NHL video games, but in a game where you can literally pummel opponents to death with hammers, you expect a little separation from realism here.
You can tell the people who designed this game had a blast making it as absurdly, over-the-top violent as it is. You don’t just engage in fights, you literally battle the other team to the death. In fact, you can actually win a game by killing all of the other players on the team — so even if they’re ahead on goals, they still have to forfeit due to a lack of living, breathing roster personnel.
Even if you don’t like hockey you have to admire the creativity and morbid humor of the game. Under special circumstances you can bribe the referee to let you get away with certain penalties and underhanded tactics (and yes, there ARE penalties in the game, even if they have technical terms like “TERMINATION” instead of “offsides.”) One trick even lets you empty the penalty box and let your freed teammates gang up on the other team for a hilariously absurd man (monster?) advantage for a few minutes. Oh, and you have to watch out for when the fans Molotov cocktail the ice. Man, and here I was thinking the old Detroit Red Wings/Colorado Avalanche rivalry was out of hand!
The game physically plays like a “real” hockey game, but the differences are VERY notable. For example, you’ll never see the enemy net turn into a 20 foot tall Eldritch abomination and eat Wayne Gretzky in any other hockey video game, I’ll tell you that much. And I have a hard time believing that the NHL today would be OK with a game that lets virtual players chase after each other with axes and chainsaws and literally vivisect one another on the rink like it was a Terrifier sequel. As tongue-in-cheek as it is, I’m still a little surprised Mutant League Hockey gets away with so much fantastical, pie-in-the-sky mayhem. I mean, this thing has a dedicated sucker punch button for every player in the game, not to mention players getting impaled against the boards and getting blown to bits by incendiary devices.
You might think a game like Mutant League Hockey is all aesthetics — and with a horror-heavy concept like this, of course it’s a big selling point — but there’s definitely some real depth to the gameplay here. You can do on the fly player substitutions and set up wrist shots and even coordinate real plays instead of just ramming into everybody like a maniac. Just because dragons sometimes show up at random intervals to eat defensemen doesn’t mean this game is devoid of strategy and technique, you know.
The attention to detail is just great. There are about two dozen or so rinks in the game and they all look unique. Sometimes the color of the “ice” will be different and the composition of the fans in the audience will always fluctuate. Just how much forethought did the developers have? Instead of a Zamboni resurfacing the ice after every period, you get to watch a Tremors-like worm monster sweep it up instead. And since this game is a creation of the scatalogically-obsessed ‘90s zeitgeist, of course you have the ability to fart on other players while you’re at it.
Sure, the game is limited in some ways. It doesn’t have a real season mode, so you’re pretty much stuck playing one-and-done exhibitions games for the rest of eternity. And although it’s not a surprise in any way, shape or form, it is very easy to cheat at the game and exploit certain mechanics to suck away all of the challenge/balance. But thankfully the multiplayer dynamic is there to extend the game’s shelf-life; in fact, with one of those handy adaptors that haven’t been manufactured in 35 years up to four people can play Mutant League Hockey simultaneously. It might sound like a one-note joke game, but this thing has some substance to it. And boy, is it fun to make all of your players attack the referee at the same time and literally tear him limb to limb.
Mutant League Hockey isn’t for all tastes. But if you like goons, goblins and finesse skaters getting tangled up in barbed wire, you’ll probably find something to like about this game. Let’s just say that when they call the in-house piano player an “organ grinder,” this time they REALLY mean it.